Ghost votes

My grandmother on my mother’s side passed away today (My grandma Phillips died in April). A recent letter from my mother mentioned that she had helped my grandparents with their absentee ballots on the 21st. Does my grandmother’s vote count? According to this Slate Explainer, the rules, like all election law, vary from state to state. Some allow the votes to stay and some demand they be pulled. I called the county election commissioner and asked what the laws were in Nebraska. She said that if they had the ballot already, it would be in the system and counted. Now this is not a definitive statement on the law, since if there was a law it would be hard to enforce. I’m not going to be an alarmist about dead people voting, but I did find this quote from a 2004 USA TODAY article interesting:

How many of those voters won’t be alive on Election Day? Considering that an average of 455 voting-age people die in Florida every day, and that the 2000 presidential election was decided by a mere 537 votes, dead votes that slip through the cracks could become a meaningful bloc.

This entry was posted
on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 6:13 pm and is filed under People.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.